by Micol Ostow
There had been a deer, hadn’t there?
“You did. Hit something.” She pointed, and I followed her gaze.
There, on the windshield, where the mirror-image had made contact with my car, crept a nasty spiderweb of cracks. In the center, an angry red smear screamed accusingly, a bloody target.
The air around me seemed to fall away. “But …,” I faltered.
Knowing seeped from her, leaked from her sea-green eyes. “If it was a deer, then where is it?”
“I don’t know. The impact, maybe?” I scanned the shoulder for any trace of an injured animal.
There. The dirty felt—that stained, furry fabric. The one that the figure had held out to me. It was lodged under one of the car’s front tires.
That much, at least, I hadn’t imagined.
“That,” I said, gesturing toward it. “What’s that?”
She hitched up her pants, faded jeans that sagged in the seat, and darted toward it.
“Oh, you shouldn’t—” I called out, worried that it was maybe a wild animal, broken and battered beyond saving. I hadn’t meant for her to try to get a closer look. But she’d already snatched it up and was making her way back to me, clutching it against her chest.
It was an animal, I realized, as she drew closer. But not a live one. She was holding a small, stuffed dog.
It was covered in bloodstains.
The stains had streaked across her top, a loose, cotton piece that had been cornflower blue to begin with, but now appeared a wild, modern-art print, dusted with handfuls of road grime and smears of … yes, it was definitely blood.
I swooned.
“YOU SHOULD PUT THAT DOWN,” I managed, when the wave of dizziness finally passed. “It’s filthy.” And we still hadn’t found the presumably injured deer. And if the object that the mirror-image carried was here, then where had she gone?
(Go. Away. CRAZY.)
None of this made any sense.
I swayed again in the heat, knees buckling as the air in front of me appeared to ripple, to shimmer and bend.
I felt the girl’s hand on my forearm, cooler to the touch than I would have imagined. “It’s okay,” she assured me. “It’s mine.” She meant the stuffed animal.
I looked down at her, searched the toffee-colored freckles splashed across the bridge of her nose. “It’s yours?” This, too, made no sense to me.
She shrugged.
A SURGE PASSED OVER ME, slinking along my skin. There was a sharp clap of thunder overhead and I flinched, bracing for a deluge, but none came. In the distance, lightning forked neon through the sky.
“I’m Gwen,” I told her. “I saw you down by the river.”
“I know,” she replied. “I’m Annie.”
“That’s a nice name.” Though it didn’t quite suit her, even with her moppish, live-wire ponytail of copper curls, and those round, baleful eyes.
“It’s babyish,” she protested. “It’s not … me.” She pursed her lips and again, that charge ran through me. Again, thunder echoed, rumbling, from all sides.
I focused on a brownish-red stain at her breastbone. It looked like a half-moon, blooming just above her heart. Looking at it, I had to shudder.
“So what would you prefer?” I asked her. “What is you, then?” I tried to tease, to speak lightly, but my voice rose, reverberating in the humid air like a tuning fork.
“Don’t worry.” Those baleful eyes narrowed.
“You’ll find out.”
THE GROUND RUMBLED before I had a chance to respond to Annie. Hearing the low growl of an engine, I turned to find a boxy, bright yellow hatchback moving smoothly toward us.
The car pulled up so that the driver and I were parallel. It was a woman with muddy brown eyes and a severe middle part in her dark, shoulder-length hair. She kept her hand on the gearshift as she regarded me.
“Need a ride?” she asked.
I did, obviously, but still wasn’t used to small-town life and didn’t fully trust a stranger’s intentions. A shortcoming of my own, maybe. But also, there was Annie to consider.
“I’m okay, actually,” I insisted, smiling in a way I hoped appeared confident. “I’m not far from home. I guess that’s the good news.” I gestured down the road, back from where I’d come, where Amity stood, isolated and apart from the fabric of Concord. “We just bought—”
She grunted, cutting me off. “Oh. You’re the ones who bought Amity.” She frowned. “How’re you finding it?”
“We—” I considered. “We like it. I was just trying to get to the library, actually. To see if there was any information about the house’s history.”
She scowled. “Well, you wouldn’t’ve found anything anyway. There was a flood a few years back. Concord River rose during the rainy season. Water got all up in the library, through from the basement and halfway up the ground floor. Records were all destroyed.”
It felt like a punch to my stomach. “Oh.” The word came out slowly. And what had Luke said earlier? That he already knew what there was to know about Amity? “Well, then, I guess it doesn’t matter that I won’t be making it into town today.”
“I guess not.” She clutched at the gearshift, manipulating it so that the car bucked, the engine snarling. “I’ll call for a tow for you when I get where I’m going. But you should be getting back to the house now. Sooner than later, you know?”
I forced a smile as if her words were light, innocent. As if she weren’t hinting, I suspected, at something more. As if I weren’t certain that I felt, that I sensed, Amity’s tug on me even now, even as I stood here, stranded on a backcountry road.
She didn’t smile back. My own grin faded and my hands fell to my sides.
She coughed, and sped off into the distance.
“ANNIE. ARE PEOPLE AROUND HERE ALWAYS so unfr—”
I paused, my stomach a trapdoor that had just been released, my throat dry, tight, closing fast. Around me, the woods seemed to hold its collective breath, the air heavy with moisture, roiling with the threat of a storm.
Annie was gone.
She had vanished. Her doll, her sad, stained stuffed dog—it had disappeared with her. And that wasn’t all.
The bloody strike, the nest of shattered glass spread across the windshield of my mother’s car?
Both of those had vanished, completely, as well.
TEN YEARS EARLIER
DAY 15
3:14 A.M.
I felt a tug, like clammy fingertips, at my toes.
Go away, I thought, though I couldn’t’ve said who I was talking to. I kicked my feet and rolled over. That’s when I realized:
The ground was hard, solid underneath me. Instead of my mattress, or a sweaty mess of sheets and blankets, I was pressed against wood, all knotty and warped against my bare chest.
It was like … like waking up inside of a pine box.
I snapped my eyes open. “Where—”
I realized right away.
The boathouse.
I could hear the slosh of the river lapping against the dock posts, could smell the algae creeping along, slick and slimy against the bottom of the rickety little shed.
Somehow, I woke up in the boathouse.
There was a shovel next to me.
Someone—or something—wanted me to dig.
Amity, I thought.
I stood.
THE NEXT MORNING, I WAS BACK IN MY OWN BED.
When I opened my eyes, I thought I remembered, sort of, the boathouse, the shovel. And digging, maybe? Did I dig last night?
The sun was bright, really pounding through the window, shouting at me to get moving. I tore the sheets and blankets off and threw them on the ground. My spine crackled when I swung around and lowered my legs onto the floor. I was coughing the last dregs of night up when my eyes finally focused and I caught sight of my feet.
They were covered in mud.
Next to the bed there was a battered old binder, filthy white plastic that was cracked at the corners.
It was covered in mud, too. It stank like the air in the boathouse, like that dead-body rot I smelled in my dreams.
Did I dig this up? I couldn’t say. The buzzing in my fingers made me think yes.
Was this what Amity left for me in the boathouse?
I grabbed the binder and flipped it open. It felt like being electrocuted, kind of, when my fingers touched the cover. But in a good way. It was some kind of scrapbook, filled in with hole-punched newspaper articles and other clips, some pages like a photo album with the clear sheet over the sticky stuff.
I turned the pages, skimmed along. Some of the clips had highlighted parts. Memigassett, I read. Burial rituals. Nexus of power. It was like reading along to the pictures I’d seen in my dreams.
There must’ve been a breeze then, even though I didn’t feel it, because the pages kind of ruffled on their own. On my lap, the book flopped open to a bold headline, like almost a scream:
THE CONCORD RUNS RED AGAIN: FAMILY SLAUGHTERED AT AMITY.
The date on the article was the future. But close, like something that was going to happen real soon. And there was a picture, too. It was blurry, hard to make out, but I could tell:
It was a picture of me.
I didn’t bother to wonder about who put the book together, or why it was important to get it to me, or even how there was a newspaper clipping from a date that hadn’t happened yet. None of that stuff really mattered.
It was pretty cool to see my picture there, honestly. Even all blurry.
I liked it a lot.
THERE WAS OTHER STUFF IN THE SCRAPBOOK, TOO, like information, I mean, about Amity. And, yeah, it was all pretty similar to what Jules told me at night, in those waking-dream times.
I read this thing about the basement, which I’d kind of already guessed. Those giant, smooth stones were used for walling up hideouts, like all way back when. So later that day, I went down there, into that stale dark, tapping along the walls, listening for echoes, wondering what was buried on the other side. Nothing knocked back. But I was listening, ready.
I remembered about the red room from my dreams, you know? In the dreams, I’d been inside of it, like right in the middle of all of Amity’s strength. I wanted to get back in there, to be in there all of the time, as much as I could.
So there I was, tapping along the wall, banging my knuckles all over, listening for hollow places. The stones looked smooth enough, but they were scratching up the backs of my hands pretty good, and actually, it kind of sounded like all of them were a little bit hollow, were echoing, like kind of calling out, you know?
I crouched, knees popping. Right under the staircase, the basement floor was poured concrete, but as I ran my hands along the ground, my fingers grazed the little space where the wall and the floor came together. Right there, like a little skinny gutter, sort of, where the concrete stopped, I could feel cold, hard-packed dirt. I pressed at it and it gave, just a little.
Interesting.
You couldn’t dig up concrete, not without serious equipment.
But you could dig up the dirt.
And I had myself a shovel, right? As of last night. It was right outside, in the boathouse. It was waiting for me there when I woke up in the middle of the night. It was still waiting for me there.
I just needed to go and get it.
THE SHOVEL WAS THERE, propped against the door to the boathouse, just resting upright, like it knew I’d be coming to find it, to use it, today. Like it knew I went down to the basement and saw something that was maybe worth digging up.
I picked up the shovel. The rusty metal of its handle was rough.
“Connor.”
I almost jumped. For a minute there, I kind of forgot about the rest of the world, you know? Like everything just fell away, except Amity. But here was Jules, coming up behind me, clapping a palm on my shoulder.
“Jesus.” I shook her off.
She moved back a few paces, eyeing me kind of funny. “What are you doing out here?” Her voice squeaked.
“Nothing.” Why was she so bent out of shape anyway? “I wanted the shovel.”
“Clearly.” She twisted her hair in a knot at her neck. It was still wet from her morning shower and the shoulders of her T-shirt were soaked. “You left a mud pit in the bathroom this morning.”
“Sorry,” I said. I tried to be nice about it. But I wasn’t sorry, really. Mostly, I wished she’d leave me alone. I wanted to be by myself, didn’t want Jules poking around in the boathouse right now. Not for any reason, I mean. It just was.
“Getting into trouble out here?” She said it kind of joking, but I knew Jules well enough to tell it was a serious question.
“Come on. I just got out here,” I said, even though we both knew I never needed too much time to get into trouble. I could find trouble on a dime. Usually did.
Jules shot me a look. “You were using that shovel for something,” she said. She pointed her finger right at the same time as her jaw dropped down to her knees. “Connor. What the hell?”
I looked where she was pointing. It was the tip of the shovel, all crusted over.
Streaked with gore.
Interesting.
A head rush came over me and I rolled my shoulders back.
“What were you digging?” she asked. Her voice was all hoarse and raspy.
I stared hard at the shovel, trying to tell myself that the reddish clumps at its tip were just rust, or clay from the riverbank, or something. But inside my head, even through all of that static and fuzz, I knew better. I knew the truth. Even without being able to remember too clear.
It’s blood.
My eyes closed, that charged, rushing feeling coming back over my skin. My mouth wanted to pull into a grin.
Interesting.
Rather than tell Jules that I had no idea, frankly, what I’d dug up, I thought I’d see for myself. I shoved her out of the way and tossed the shovel down so that it landed flat on the ground, spraying some pinkish-white gunk up as it fell.
I threw the boathouse door open and went in.
JULES WAS RIGHT BEHIND ME, so once we got inside, she was the one who saw it first.
My eyes flew from corner to corner all quick, but not really taking any of it in. It was the same old boathouse as always, stinking like mildew and pond scum, with wet sections of wood curling up in splintering hunks. The floor was rotting away, and mud bubbled up through the holey parts.
I was thinking, You could dig there. You could dig all of that mud up if you wanted to. I still didn’t remember doing that, but I was caught up in thinking about it when Jules saw what she saw, and screamed.
Her shriek was sharp like broken glass, right in my ear. It made my teeth go all on edge, and for a second, I felt like I wanted to hit her. Or worse.
“Connor,” she sobbed. “What did you do?”
She grabbed me, really pinching my arms, and swung me to the left corner of the shed. She was so upset she was hyperventilating, sort of, digging into my skin with her gnawed-up fingernails.
There. There it was. There they were.
Squirrels. A little family, looked like. A mama squirrel and three little babies, curled tight, real still, piled up in a nest of leaves.
It would’ve been kind of cute, I guess, if it wasn’t for all of the blood.
Whatever killed the squirrels just completely ripped them apart. Mama’s torso was split from right underneath her chin all down between her rear legs, a mess of oozing innards pouring out. The babies’ heads were twisted so far around they were looking over their shoulders. Their paws were caught up in Mama’s guts and the nest leaves were all shredded and stained with blood. A little cloud of gnats hovered over them. It was pretty gruesome.
I smiled.
Jules let go of my arms. Behind me, I heard her retch. “What the hell?” she asked again, her voice kind of choked.
That static was back, a hornets’ nest in my head. “I didn’t—”I stopped.
I didn’t do this was on the tip
of my tongue, just a reflex, really, but the truth was …
I couldn’t remember.
Maybe I did.
“I’m going to be sick.” Jules moaned, running out the back of the boathouse to the edge of the dock and leaning over just in time. She dropped down to her knees and spewed for real this time, shoulders heaving all up.
I heard a bang. The shotgun, I thought, and then realized—of course—the boathouse door just slammed shut behind us. Of course, of course. Amity.
I heard a cracking sound. It was the dock, and the snap it made when it split in two was way brighter, louder, than you would’ve expected that old, soggy wood could make.
There was another scream. It took me a minute to get that it was Jules again, louder even than when she saw the squirrels.
I watched as she plunged from the dock into the water and down.
EVEN HEARING JULES HIT THE WATER, for a second there, I was still mostly interested in the squirrels. Wondering what happened to them, I mean. Whether I happened to them.
It’s not like it would’ve been the first time, you know?
So I was kind of caught up for a second or two, like not paying attention so much to my sister. But then there was that sharp, snapping sound, and that cut-off shriek, and then a splash, and I understood that the river, she had Jules.
Which was maybe the one thing that could have pulled me back, away from the squirrels.
I rushed out the back door onto the dock. I could see the jagged edge of plank where the dock broke off, where Jules fell. I dropped down, just like Jules had, and saw her flailing, hair coming loose and fanning out all around, right under the surface of the water. She tilted her head back and just broke the surface, but when she opened her mouth to call to me, the river rushed in, choking her off. She sputtered, slapping her arms up and down again, her eyes getting wide and nervous.
She could swim, but just barely. It was the same with me.
The shovel, I thought, and ran back for it.